Chapter 4: Photo Refs vs Painted Illusions

Created by Sarah Choi (prompt writer using ChatGPT)

Photo Refs vs Painted Illusions for Costume Concept Artists

As a costume concept artist—whether you live in loose exploration or tight production paintovers—you’re constantly walking a line between photographic realism and painted illusion. You use photo refs, photobash, and overpainting to move fast, but what ultimately goes into the engine is not your photo, it’s a PBR material setup.

That means your job isn’t just “make it look real.” Your job is:

Make it look real in a way that matches how PBR will actually shade the textile.

This article explores the tension between photo references and painted illusions for costume materials, with a focus on:

  • Material IDs as a bridge between concept and 3D.
  • PBR for textiles, especially roughness, sheen, and anisotropy.
  • How to use photos intelligently without copying lighting lies.
  • How to paint illusions that are visually bold but technically believable.

It’s written equally for concept-side costume artists and production-side costume artists, in straightforward language you can bring straight into your daily workflow.

1. The Core Problem: Pretty vs Buildable

Photo refs are seductive. A single high-quality fashion shot gives you:

  • Beautiful folds
  • Rich textures
  • Complex lighting
  • Realistic skin–cloth interaction

But real-world photography is full of cheats and distortions from the lighting setup, camera, lens, and post-processing. In a PBR workflow, though, lighting and materials are separated:

  • Lighting is handled by the engine and environment.
  • Materials must behave correctly under any light.

If you mindlessly copy a photo into your concept, you risk embedding baked lighting and false cues into the design:

  • A black velvet dress looks almost glossy because of studio specular.
  • A matte wool coat looks shiny due to wet or oiled patches.
  • A plastic raincoat looks overly matte because of diffuse light and fog.

The 3D/texturing artist may then build a material that matches your painting, but not the actual fabric. In-game, under different lighting, the costume reads wrong.

Understanding photo refs vs painted illusions means learning to:

  • Read photos through a PBR lens.
  • Keep what’s material truth and ignore what’s lighting artifact.
  • Then paint illusions that are exaggerated for clarity but still PBR-consistent.

2. Photo Refs: What They’re Great For (and Where They Lie)

Photo refs are still your best friend—if you use them deliberately.

What photos are excellent for

  1. Fold logic and patterning
    How a fabric collapses around joints, stretches over tension points, piles in soft areas.
  2. Macro material cues
    • How satin vs wool vs cotton break up large forms.
    • Where highlight bands tend to appear on certain weaves.
  3. Wear patterns and dirt
    • Knees, elbows, cuffs, hems—where fabric polishes, frays, or darkens.
  4. Anisotropic direction hints
    • Direction of weave or brushed fibers.
    • How highlights stretch along the grain.

Photos are brilliant for all of this. You should absolutely build robust reference boards for each costume:

  • Front/back views of garments.
  • Detail shots of fabrics.
  • Close-ups of seams, hems, and hardware.

Where photos lie to you (PBR-wise)

Photography bakes in specific conditions:

  • Light direction – Studio key lights, backlights, spotlights.
  • Light color – Colored gels, warm tungsten, cool LED.
  • Post-processing – Curves, contrast, selective sharpening.
  • Camera properties – Lens bloom, chromatic aberration, depth of field.

These can:

  • Make matte cloth look glossy (strong specular from a hard key).
  • Make glossy cloth look matte (huge softbox smoothing everything out).
  • Hide anisotropy (overexposed specular just becomes a white smear).
  • Invent sheen where none exists (bloom and post-production tricks).

As a costume concept artist, you want to ask with every photo:

“How much of what I’m seeing is material, and how much is lighting and camera?”

The more you can separate those, the more reliable your painting becomes.

3. Material IDs: From Messy Photos to Clean Material Thinking

Photo refs are a collage of different materials, lighting, and context. Material IDs are the opposite: they’re the clean, abstracted structure of your design.

Material IDs break your costume into clear zones:

  • Cloth types (cotton, linen, wool, satin, silk, denim).
  • Leather types (matte, oiled, patent).
  • Hard materials (metal, plastic, wood, etc.).

Each zone receives a dedicated PBR material in 3D. As a concept artist, you can:

  • Sketch a small Material ID map beside your painting—flat colors for each material.
  • Use this as a sanity check: “Have I clearly separated the velvet from the leather? Or are they visually bleeding together?”

Material IDs as a filter for photos

When you look at a photo:

  1. Identify the key materials.
  2. Mentally assign them ID colors (even if only in your head).
  3. Ask: “Does this area look consistent for this material across different photos?”

If one photo shows the satin as very matte and another shows it super shiny, that discrepancy is likely lighting-driven, not material-driven.

Your Material ID mindset tells you:

  • “The base material is a low-roughness satin.
  • This shot looks matte because of soft lighting; I shouldn’t copy that mood as a material truth.”

Now you can paint the correct satin behavior while still borrowing folds and color ideas from your photos.

4. PBR Textiles 101: What You Must Get Right

For textiles, you mostly care about:

  • Base Color / Albedo – The true color of the fabric.
  • Roughness – How sharp or blurred the reflections are.
  • Sheen – Fiber-based grazing light response.
  • Anisotropy – Directional stretching of highlights along the weave/fiber.

Metalness for textiles is usually zero (except metallic threads or hardware), and normals/height handle weave bump and seams.

The big idea:

When you look at a photo, try to infer roughness, sheen, and anisotropy as if you’re reconstructing the material in a PBR shader.

Then, when you paint, your illusion matches what the engine can plausibly produce.

5. Roughness: Photo vs Painted Read

What roughness really is

Roughness defines how micro-smooth the surface is:

  • Low roughness (smooth) – Sharp, strong reflections.
  • High roughness (rough) – Soft, broad, blurry reflections.

In photos, roughness is mixed with light quality:

  • A rough fabric under a hard spotlight might show very visible highlights.
  • A smooth fabric under soft, ambient light may show only gentle gradients.

If you copy the exact highlight configuration from one photo into your concept, you might misinterpret roughness.

Reading roughness from refs

When studying a garment photo, ask:

  • Do highlights remain sharp when visible, or do they smear out quickly?
  • Are small wrinkles catching crisp glints, or just soft shifts in value?
  • Does the fabric look “powdery” (high roughness) or “wet/polished” (low roughness)?

Look for multiple images of the same material in different lighting (e.g., product photos vs runway vs street shots). The material’s roughness will show through across them, even as lighting changes.

Painting roughness illusions

In your painting:

  • Use highlight shape and edge to suggest roughness:
    • Rough cloth: broad, mild gradients, restrained specular.
    • Smooth cloth: stronger contrast and narrower highlight bands.
  • Keep roughness consistent per Material ID. If your wool cloak has one ultra-glossy fold and one super-matte fold with identical lighting, it reads as two different materials.
  • Use wear to gently vary perceived roughness (elbows, seat, knees slightly smoother) without turning the garment into a patchwork of different materials.

Your illusion is not about copying every light spot from the photo. It’s about choosing highlight behavior that matches the inferred roughness.

6. Sheen: Fiber Glow vs Studio Tricks

Sheen is a secondary, fiber-based reflection that appears mostly at grazing angles.

Photo refs of velvet, wool, and satin often look magical because:

  • There’s a soft halo around shoulders and outer edges.
  • Backlighting or rim lights punch up the edges.
  • Color grading exaggerates the glow.

Reading true sheen in photos

To isolate material sheen from lighting tricks:

  • Compare shots of the same fabric under different camera angles.
  • Look for consistency: does the fabric regularly show a soft, colored edge highlight?
  • Notice whether the sheen shifts with viewing angle, not just light placement.

If a fabric only glows in heavily backlit, color-graded promo shots but looks flat in neutral photos, be cautious—some of that sheen is photo styling, not material.

Painting convincing sheen

In your concepts:

  • Reserve sheen accents for materials that actually have strong fiber glows (velvet, velour, certain wools, some synthetics).
  • Paint soft edge highlights that wrap the form gently rather than hard white outlines.
  • Tint sheen slightly towards the fabric’s local color, not pure white.

For example:

  • A deep blue velvet cloak: use rich, dark cores with subtle, soft blue rim sheen along edges.
  • A premium wool coat: very faint, broad sheen near shoulders and outer contour under strong light.

When you exaggerate sheen in painting, do it as a clarity boost—communicating that the shader should use a cloth sheen term—not as uncontrolled glowing that nothing in PBR can replicate.

7. Anisotropy: Directional Highlights and Weave Clues

In photos of satin, silk, technical sportswear, and certain wools, highlights stretch along a direction. This is anisotropy in action.

The problem: photography can blur or distort this, especially with motion or bloom. You need to see through the noise to the underlying pattern.

Recognizing anisotropy in refs

Look for signs like:

  • Highlights that form streaks rather than dots, following fold direction.
  • Reflective bands that twist as the cloth twists.
  • Brushed fabrics that show subtle directional grain in raking light.

Gather multiple refs of the same type of fabric to reinforce the pattern in your mind.

Painting anisotropic illusions

When you paint:

  • Shape your highlights to follow the fabric flow:
    • A sleeve with satin: elongated highlights running along the arm.
    • A silk skirt: highlight arcs that follow the radial fall of the fabric.
  • Add gentle directional streaking inside the highlight, hinting at aligned fibers.
  • Use arrows in your callouts to indicate intended anisotropy direction for 3D and lookdev.

The goal is not to perfectly simulate the shader, but to clearly communicate:

“This fabric’s specular should be anisotropic along this direction.”

8. Photo-Bash vs Paint: Common Failure Modes

Both exploration and production artists use photobash to work quickly. Problems arise when the photo’s baked lighting is pasted into a context with totally different lighting.

Failure mode 1: Confused roughness

  • Photobashed leather panel with sharp reflections sits next to painted cloth with too-soft highlights.
  • Lighting direction on the photo panel doesn’t match your scene lighting.

Result: The costume looks like it’s made of mismatched materials even when it’s meant to be the same leather.

Fix:

  • Overpaint the specular behavior. Repaint highlights to unify roughness and light direction.
  • Use photo texture for color and pattern, not untouchable specular.

Failure mode 2: HDR-photo sheen that can’t exist in-engine

  • High-end fashion shot has strong bloom and color grading.
  • You paste it into a concept with neutral environment light.
  • The fabric seems to glow in a way that a standard cloth shader cannot achieve.

Fix:

  • Dial back glow and bloom; repaint sheen as softer, PBR-consistent effect.
  • Use photos for shape and reference, but let your painting define the final material response.

Failure mode 3: Anisotropy chaos

  • You use three different silk refs with highlights running in conflicting directions.
  • After photobash, the garment looks chaotic and incoherent.

Fix:

  • Decide on a single fabric grain direction for each Material ID.
  • Overpaint highlights so anisotropy consistently follows grain.
  • Treat photos as raw material, not final lighting truth.

9. Two Perspectives: Exploration vs Production Concepting

For concept-side costume artists (blue-sky and early ideation)

Your main responsibilities:

  • Establish material identity and emotional tone.
  • Communicate broad fabric categories and where they go.
  • Provide compelling images that sell character and story.

How photo vs paint awareness helps:

  • You can choose references that support the correct PBR behavior (e.g., picking real wool for a wool coat, not styling shots that misrepresent it).
  • When you stylize or exaggerate, you know which parts you’re exaggerating (e.g., slightly stronger sheen, but still reading as wool).
  • You avoid designing impossible materials that only exist in graded photos, not in PBR.

You don’t need to annotate every stitch—but you can:

  • Keep material separation visible.
  • Use light to show roughness and sheen differences, not just shape.

For production-side costume artists (handoff and implementation support)

Your main responsibilities:

  • Deliver concepts that can be turned into material setups.
  • Create callout sheets, Material ID maps, and reference packs.
  • Clarify any ambiguous choices made in early concepts.

How you apply photo vs paint thinking:

  • Curate references into per-material boards: “matte wool”, “oiled leather”, “satin with strong anisotropy”.
  • Annotate photos to highlight material truth vs lighting artifact.
  • Paint clearly defined roughness, sheen, anisotropy behavior and explicitly note it.

You become the translator between “this looks cool” and “this is how it’s built in the shader.”

10. Practical Exercises to Build This Skill

You can train yourself to see through photos and paint better illusions with simple drills.

Exercise 1: Photo → PBR Breakdown

Take a single high-quality garment photo. Underneath it, make three mini-panels:

  1. Material IDs – Flat colors for each major textile and hardware.
  2. Roughness notes – For each ID, write a simple roughness phrase (“matte wool”, “semi-gloss leather”, “low-roughness satin”).
  3. Sheen/anisotropy arrows – Draw small arrows and edge markers showing where sheen appears and which way anisotropic highlights run.

Then paint a small de-lit version of the garment, imagining it under neutral studio lighting with no heavy grading. This trains you to separate material definition from photo styling.

Exercise 2: Photobash Clean-Up

Grab a messy photobashed costume (your own or a practice piece) and:

  • Identify all areas where lighting directions conflict.
  • Repaint highlights to unify light direction and roughness.
  • Adjust sheen and anisotropy so each material ID feels internally consistent.

Compare the before/after. The “after” should feel more like it lives in one coherent 3D world.

Exercise 3: Paint-Only Material Studies (No Photo Specular)

Set up a simple front-lit bust or mannequin and paint three versions of the same costume:

  1. Matte version – Push roughness up on all fabrics.
  2. Glossy version – Lower roughness, add stronger specular while staying plausible.
  3. Sheen + anisotropy version – Introduce cloth sheen and directional highlights.

Do this from imagination or with very soft reference. The goal is to control material feel without copying photo highlight patterns, relying instead on your understanding of PBR behavior.

11. Communicating Clearly in Your Deliverables

To make your work production-friendly:

  1. Include a Material ID sketch
    • Simple flat-color breakdown.
    • Helps everyone see the material structure at a glance.
  2. Add PBR-centered notes per material
    • Roughness: “high, matte”, “mid, softly glossy”, “low, polished”.
    • Sheen: “strong velvet sheen on edges”, “subtle wool sheen”, or “no visible sheen”.
    • Anisotropy: arrows indicating grain direction where it matters.
  3. Curate ref boards with commentary
    • Mark where photos are misleading due to lighting.
    • Highlight the images that best show the true material behavior.
  4. Use paint to override photo lies
    • Overpaint photobashed areas so final image matches your PBR notes.

These habits transform your concept from “pretty picture” into a technical and artistic specification for textile behavior.

12. Conclusion: Realism That Survives the Engine

Photo references will always be central to costume concept art—and so will painted illusions. The key is to make sure your illusions are:

  • Grounded in PBR material truth rather than photo tricks.
  • Organized via Material IDs so 3D and lookdev know how to implement them.
  • Expressed clearly through roughness, sheen, and anisotropy behavior that the shader can actually reproduce.

When you learn to look at a photo and ask, “What’s material, what’s lighting, and how will this behave under any light?” you level up from image-maker to material storyteller.

Whether you’re sketching first-pass outfits or locking down final production paintovers, that mindset will make your costumes more convincing, more buildable, and more powerful on screen.